Game-ifying the Apocalypse - optimizing for success

I like Factory Town. I like the game, though I don't actually play it anymore - as I'm on and off ocupying my time with different things. And the end-game of it is just funny to me. Generally speaking the game is about growth; Automating the gathering of resources and making products of them. Technically you could stop the game at any point, more or less, and call it a day - since the little workers of the Town don't actually 'need' anything. But that's not the point of the game. You ... start by letting them carry food and water to the houses - that'll give you happy coins and happy score - and that eventually leads to population growth. That means you can build more buildings in which work is done, or workers to carry things around - so eventually the more advanced products help you unlock a new Tech Level. Eventually you'd replace workers carrying stuff around with conveyor belts - and by the end that gets so ridiculous that you'll need multiple high speed conveyor belts to constantly pump goods into the population centers.

I find it funny because it's kind of perverted. The entire logic revolves entirely around goods and their consumption - as the workers don't have any needs; And apart from being units that can perform work within the system they only consume things in exchange for happy coins.
And when too fixated on that, it might seem that this is 1:1 how it is in real life. That all we need are goods; And the money to buy them. But life is a lot more beyond that. However - that isn't so much what I'm trying to get at.

So, let's just think in terms of Factory Town for a moment. Say each person needs like 1 kilogram of food-stuff per day. That means, that a town of 1 million people, will require 1 million kilograms of foodstuff delivered to it per day. That is 41000 kilograms per hour, or roughly 700 kilograms of foodstuff per minute. If we want to be generous, that's one metric ton per minute.
Say, if 100000 of them read newspaper, and one newspaper weighs 250 grams, it'll also want to process 25 metric tons of paper per day.
And to not make it too complicated - that'll also be something over a million kilograms of waste produced every day. And that is like the real crux of proper urban design. So, plumbing that entails not only water supply and disposal, but also - possibly - more specialized things like maybe gas or toxic waste lines; And ontop of that electricity lines, logistics and general traffic infrastructure. At a bare minimum.

One thing that's a huge problem to get anything started could be labeled as the "commerce spiral". For people to live somewhere, they need to be able to afford it, which requires them to work. A town without commerce is unattractive, and unattractive town doesn't attract people, and a low population is bad for commerce. And it's not just commerce, though we could count education and health care to it nonetheless.
Then people may want some form of entertainment, booze, weed, recreational areas - quality of life things of different flavors; Things that may in turn attract more people which may let the area become a focal point of growth that will/may require expansion of all of the above. Eventually so by magnitudes.


Now, my prediction is that as Neo-Gnosticism takes off ... people will more and more want a solution to optimize these things in congruence with our ideology.
So, if we want to take the matter of 'organic growth' as the good thing, imagining it as a ball, it is at first certainly in the hands - or by the feet - of capitalism. That because socialism is thought to be this top-down big-government big-brother esque monster versus the cancer that is capitalism. So much for organic growth being good, I suppose.
If we all were Neo-Gnostics all of a sudden, that would change though. The rule would still be the same. Mandated growth = bad because it's not sure if anyone wants it. Capitalism however also has 'mandated growth' - while with Neo-Gnosticism we open the doors to re-consider; To be more purposeful with what we waste our time on.

My estimate is that we'll want to live in compounds. Say, 4 single individuals living by themselves versus 4 single individuals living as an organized group might not reduce the amount of food-stuff needed, but it should reduce energy costs; Such as for transportation.
Expanding this idea to the point where a compound consists of kitchen, tech and livelihood people, next to whomever is out working, the amount of energy spent by people going to and coming from work could also be reduced ... by like 75%. That reduces clutter during rush-hour. If we further organize the distribution of food-stuff, that reduction could even be increased. That generally is what I think of as "the Starship Model" - thinking of a Starship as in Star Trek; Or perhaps any vessel that is semi-isolated from the outside world for any extended period of time.
It's similar what the "nuclear family" tries to accomplish, but bigger and better.

From this concept we can extrapolate different solutions. These so dependent on various forms of cohabitation - relative to the various types of relationships that people might cohabitate within. On the one hand we might have the odd, ever so unattractive dormitory type 'stranger on stranger' type thing; And on the other we might have familiarized 'town in town' type of stuff, next to whatever and ever.

The general gist of this is that this is easy to get to naturally, or organically. But similar to the commerce spiral, it also requires some kickstarting. To make any good of it, people will need to come together that want to live together; And they'll need to be composed such that the practical needs can be met. And then ... buildings need to be built that can accommodate that.


If we want to technically manifacture something like that, considering that we at first have no clue what'll stick and what won't, we want to be able to start without any kind of major commitments. So, preferrably, we'd look for solutions that work within the contemporary infrastructure.
To my understanding, one simple way to get there is to start with "capacity based re-construction". So, starting with a Kitchen, there's a correlation between people working in and around it (as to keep it running and supplied) and the amount of people it can sustain - the "kitchen staff" included. The first incentive to volunteer for that is given once supply can be sustained - thereby also establishing a mutual interest in quality; Whereby the Kitchen Folks are disjointed from "the greater economy" - partaking of the food that is produced. So, whatever it costs needs to be stemmed by those that have income - while by taxing some kind of Universal Basic Income can be organized for those that are removed from "the greater economy" to still have "freedom units".

This yields a basic union between external and internal workers; That between themselves produce some amount of excess capacity. This yields that while they bear the burden, they're also responsible for the politics of that compound. So to formulate rules.
As a basic starting point, any one individual - assuming that that's the whole world all of a sudden - will be "excess capacity"; Being at first, by and large, free to do whatever. For as long as they follow the rules. This 'whatever' feeds at first into two basic concepts. That is for once 'the greater economy' and on the other side 'their personal fulfillment'. And these two further support each other.
So, "excess capcity" will on the one end find their place as part of the greater economy - while also searching for their personal fulfillment. Or so a compound that is more in line with their personal expectations. Overall are these compounds individual communities that would most likely assemble into greater compounds - and on the other a basic building block of human civilization.


One general challenge is to gauge cost versus benefit - given that the amount of people a kitchen tries to supply increases the overall complexity of the endeavor, such as potentially increasing waste; Though there are work-arounds such as portioning food into tupper-ware or something.
It would probably take some time before we can then also attempt to adjust laws and regulations and stuff to the new ideal; While that's probably also yield a greater shift in how we organize. High density living can become more attractive, freeing space and improving ecological conditions. Such and such.


In a sense, it almost seems to be inevitable. Whatever sacrifices one has to make is probably a better deal compared to succumbing to the apocalypse.